Steve Meltzer

Arthur Tress is a master storyteller who first gained recognition with his hauntingly beautiful book of images: The Dream Collector (Richmond, Westover 1972). The book was a challenge to the photographic ethos of its time.

Great photographs are not the result of great cameras. Superb cameras help, but the real secret to making great images is the ability to see photographs in your mind’s eye before you take them. Once this ability to “pre-visualize” an image is learned, it quickly becomes second nature. Here are five simple tips to jump-start your thinking outside the camera.

The Hôtel Déclic is a photographer’s theme park wrapped in the luxury of an elegant 4-star hotel in Paris, France. I discovered it as I was planning a trip to the City of Lights for the publication of a new book of my photographs.

Like the Olympus Pen, the Panasonic GX8 and the Fujifilm X-T10, the Df’s clean lines, sharp edges and large controls are reminiscent of the finest cameras of film’s glory days in the 1980s and 1990s. They are part of the “retro style” trend that, in the words of the inimitable Yogi Berra, is “déjà vu all over again.”

The decisive moment had decisively passed and I missed another great shot: While framing and reframing my zoom lens the scene changed, the sun slid behind a cloud, and people in the shot moved. I finally realized I was missing shots because I had too much gear.

For my photography I prefer small, lightweight, responsive cameras to big, heavy, bulky DSLRs. While small cameras once lagged behind DSLRs in image quality and performance, today’s compact cameras are challenging their dominance with great cameras like the Sony A7S II, Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX100, Nikon P900 and the new, elegant retro Olympus Pen-F. These compact, bridge and hybrid cameras can even do things some big, bulky DSLRs can’t.

After 140 years of photography, camera design has reached something of a pinnacle with today’s DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. But along the way to our digital era there were lots of false starts and dead ends. These were unusual cameras that had their brief moment and then simply disappeared.

Scottish photographer and living legend Albert Watson is no stranger to accolades. Earlier this year, Watson was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for his contributions to photography.

In 1955, armed with a couple of Leicas, several bottles of French brandy, and hundreds of rolls of film, the photographer Robert Frank set out on an odyssey to look for the soul of America. Behind the wheel of his black Ford Business coupe, he drove over 10,000 miles of endless highways and forgotten back roads; and made nearly 27,000 photographs. From these road-trip images he created a “photobook,” a work that has had a profound impact on photography and photographers ever since: The Americans.